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“I’m here.”

“Stay where I can hear you.”

I don’t move until morning.

Chapter 5

Sofia

By the third morning, I’ve written the rules of my own captivity on the back of a treatment sheet.

I do it at dawn, sitting cross-legged on the narrow bed with a borrowed pen and the sheet flat on my knee. My handwriting is steadier than I expected. If I can’t have the door, I can have the terms.

At the six o’clock check, he knocks and says my name. I slide the page under the door before he can turn the key.

It goes quiet on the other side while he reads.

One. You knock and say my name before the lock turns. Every time.

Two. You tell me the time when you lock it, and why.

Three. You don’t come into this room.

Four. When 14C needs me, I go to her. Not at your check. At hers.

Five. One question at every check. You answer it true.

The lock turns. He opens the door and holds the page up where I can see it. He hasn’t folded it.

“The first three I was already doing,” he says.

“Now they’re in writing.”

He looks at the page a moment longer. “Yes. To all of it.”

He doesn’t negotiate. He doesn’t add a line of his own. He takes the pen out of my hand, signs his name under number five, gives the pen back, and puts the page on the floor just inside the door, on my side of the threshold.

It’s the first document in this building that belongs to me.

I walk past him to the shed with my bag. 14C is standing, chewing, flicking an ear at me. Her temperature is normal. Her gums are pink. She leans her weight into my hip while I listen to her lungs, and I let her, because she’s the only one out here who asks.

“Question,” I say, without looking up from the stethoscope.

“Go ahead.”

“Who has keys to the old family channel?”

“Calvin did. Russell. Me. Garrett has the new one. The old one runs through a repeater on the rise, and every key leaves a mark in the log.”

“Who reads the log?”

“That’s two questions.”

I look up at him. He’s standing outside the rail with his arms loose at his sides, and there’s something at the corner of his mouth that isn’t a smile yet.

“Nobody,” he says anyway. “Nobody’s read it in years.”

He knows what I’m doing. I can see it in the way he answers, plain and fast, like a man handing over tools. I’m building a map of his family out of the answers he owes me, and he’s letting me.